shelob

Me:
“Yes I know, there are more things that will kill you than anywhere else in the world”

Friend X:
“Yea, so why would you ever want to live in a place where spiders in every dark corner can kill you, where the top ten poisonous snakes in the world live, where the taipan, a snake that carries venom 50 times more deadly than that of the cobra can kill (according to dailymail, one bite can kill 100 adult men and 250 000 mice within 45 minutes), or where box jellyfishes or the less commonly known Irukandji, a name that literally means “impending doom” and is the size of your thumbnail and is transparent…

But I’m not here to go on about all the different creatures that can kill you in Australia, trust me, my friends have tagged me in enough buzzfeed posts and Australian news. What I want to talk about today is why I can’t get over my fear of spiders.

I’m going to break it down into three main reasons

1. If you’re scared, I’m scared too

I’ve never always been afraid of spiders. I blame my family friend who passed his fear of spiders onto me. As a kid, I’ve always looked up to him and so when I saw how terrified he was of spiders, it made me realize how scary spiders truly were. Hence his screams, became my screams as well.

I’ve tried so, so hard to find a way to see spiders in a new light. Trying to find the cuteness I see in dogs, in spiders as well. But Nope. Why are they so hairy, why do you have EIGHT GLOSSY EYES, why do you crawl in an unpredictable manner, WHERE DO YOU COME FROM? WHY DO YOU HAVE SO MANY LEGS? Why do you produce silk that I don’t ever try to walk into but do anyways?

3. Movies don’t like you too

Aragog in Harry Potter, you have an eighteen-foot leg span, how can I ignore that

Shelob in Lord of the Rings- You feast on your own children, you almost killed Frodo, you’re large and immense and just hella ugly (sorry).

So why this rant? There was a daddy longlegs in my room last night, and I was just going to let it go, but it started dangling and dancing along in its web, and I just couldn’t ignore it. And so, I killed it. My punishment? A nightmare of a huntsman spider (which I know aren’t really that toxic) crawling towards me on my bed. I woke up instantly and began to think if I’ll ever get over this fear. Conclusion: Nope.

For the last two times I was in Australia, I’ve been very lucky with spider encounters. My “out of sight, out of mind / ignorance is bliss” was very effective. But it had just hit me that I was going to be living up in the tropics this time- where all things deadly live, where these deadly creatures are much more common.